They Can Sell but Can They Do Fundraising?

Who is likely to succeed as a nonprofit fundraiser? The question came up when I met David Edell, an associate who had spent 13 years in fundraising and 16 years as a nonprofit search consultant with DRG Inc. in New York City. David had seen firsthand the difficulty nonprofits have in recruiting talented fundraisers. Fundraising seems on the surface like a job that should parallel commercial sales jobs. But in David's extensive experience, skilled commercial salespeople don't always make the transition successfully.

I chose the job personality tests published by Hogan Assessment Systems as the testing vehicles for our investigation. The Hogan instruments have sound theoretical premises, rigorous mathematical foundations, and don't discriminate on age, race, or gender.

We approached the question much the same as we would have for any employer who wanted to validate the use of a pre-employment test. The difference was that we were validating a set of characteristics for a common job title within a business sector. We recruited twelve Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), all vice presidents of development, from major nonprofit organizations to create the study.

Our SMEs quickly informed us we needed to define two fundraising jobs in our investigation: Fundraising Generalist and Major Gifts Professionals. Different personality characteristics and competencies, and Creative Problem Solving are slightly lower for Fundraiser Generalists than for Major Gifts Professionals. Major Gift professionals in our study score somewhat higher on Adjustment, Ambition, and Sociability.

For comparison purposes, we looked at a sample of salespeople in three
commercial organizations. The corresponding scales for commercial salespeople are quite different. Successful commercial sales people have high ambition, self-confidence, and sociability. They have average to high scores for creative problem solving. They have average to low scores for conformity and conscientiousness. They are likely to be highly flexible in their approach to problem-solving.

Core Competencies

A competency is knowledge, skill, or ability necessary to accomplish a job requirement. We asked the SMEs to rate 62 competencies for both job titles and learned that the top 15 competencies desirable in a Fundraising Generalist differed from those needed by Major Gift Professionals. Table 1

shows the top five competencies for the two fundraising specialties.

Table 1
Fundraising Generalist

1. Interpersonal Skills
2. Trustworthiness
3. Integrity
4. Written Communication
5. Customer Service

Major Gifts Professional
1. Customer Service
2. Achievement Orientation
3. Trustworthiness
4. Interpersonal Skills
5. Oral Communication

In summary, we learned that a personality test can be useful in filling these two fundraising positions. Testing would help a nonprofit organization identify the degree to which individuals possess the characteristics and competencies needed to succeed in these two job titles.

Note:

David Edell and Paul Connolly produced the specialized NPEdge reports based on this study. To learn more about David Edell, visit his web site: www.drgnyc.com. To learn more about Performance Programs, visit www.performanceprograms.com